TH Somervell-Man of Everest

TH Somerville-front left with G Bruce right.1924 Everest Expedition. Photo, Bentley Beetham.

HE WAS already the grandest of old men when I met him in the early summer of 1970. He was then 80 years old, rotund, rubicund and happy, living in a house above Ambleside looking across at the Langdale fells — those same fells on which he had started his climbing career at the turn of the century. And now he is dead —Theodore Howard Somervell, a man of great stamina and even greater ideals. We, in the mountaineering world, will remember him as one of the two men who on June 2, 1924, reached a height of 28,000 feet on the North face of Everest but in India he will be remembered as a surgeon who devoted his life to healing the sick and teaching a new generation of surgeons and physicians. He was born in Kendal in 1890, the son of W. H. Somervell who was then the head of the boot and shoe manufacturers that still exist in that town. Soon he was wandering alone in the Lakeland Fells and extending his horizon to mild rock climbs.

And soon he graduated to the Alps where his father offered to pay for some guides. 'I looked very carefully at what the guides were doing and I saw that a guide isn't a magician — he's a man with experience who knows what snow and ice means. Well, I already knew what rock climbing meant so after that season in the Alps, I never had a guide and I did all the route finding.' He was lucky to survive the war —his ship was delayed by submarines on the way to the Dardanelles — and in 1921 he graduated from University College Hospital as a doctor and surgeon. In 1922 General Bruce chose him for that first assault on Everest. Howard Somervell himself was very modest about the reasons for his selection. He talked about the many better climbers who had been killed in the war and thought that he was chosen because of his stamina.

He told a story of being challenged by some friends to try to beat the record for the Cuillin ridge in Skye which at that time stood at just over 12 hours. He knocked some two and a half hours off that record. When I talked to him he laughed at his own performance compared to the modern record of four hours nine minutes set by Eric Beard. On that 1922 Everest expedition he was involved in a terrible avalanche on the North Col: 'I was quite certain that we were going to be carried over the ice cliff — so certain of it that I don't remember being frightened. I think that one is only frightened if there is some doubt about it but I thought that in five seconds I would see what wonderful things happen after death.'

But his patch of snow stopped and he dug himself out only to find that seven Sherpas were missing. 'We climbed down to the bottom of the cliff and dug them out and all except one was dead. And that was the end of the 1922 Expedition.' He was back in Darjeeling by August and had to wait two months for his boat home so he spent his time travelling around India: 'As a result of what I saw I decided that I must spend the rest of my active life (he was 32 years old at the time) trying to help. There were so few surgeons working in that immense country and there I stayed in a mission hospital for 25 years and then I went on to teach the coming generation.

Original Somervell watercolour

 We could have done so much more if only we'd had more time. ‘Coming from a civilised country you could hardly believe the things we saw every day.' But Everest was to call him away again and in 1924, he and Norton were selected for the second push to the summit after Mallory and Geoffrey Bruce had retreated. Their epic climb to well over 28,000 feet is well documented but I shall always remember this gentle giant sitting in front of a window overlooking the Lakeland fells and recalling the descent: Norton with increasingly painful snowblindness and Somervell, with a plug in his throat that was on the verge of stopping him breathing: 'We were unroped and Norton was ahead and I couldn't breathe in or out so I sat down in the snow and made violent efforts to cough. But I couldn't and I thought "Oh well, this is the end. Cheerio everybody!

And then I remembered my medical training — that most of our breathing is done with the diaphragm and so I gave one huge cough and at the same time pressed hard with my hands into my tummy. That did the trick. Up came a horrible black slough which I think was the inside of my larynx. Intense pain —but complete relief. It hurt like hell but it was air in sufficient quantity to keep me alive. If only it had happened higher up, we might both have gone on very much further.' And now he is dead at the age of 84 and I am proud that I met him: mountaineer, surgeon, musician and artist but above all, a man who loved his fellow men, a man who enriched all those diverse people who came into the Christian aura which surrounded his life.

On what happened to Mallory and Irvine I always think it is quite possible that they did get to the top and then had an accident on the way down. We know that Norton and I reached our highest point at about three in the afternoon whereas Mallory and Irvine were seen on the Second Step at 12.30, I believe. So they were two and a half hours in front of us and a couple of hundred feet higher. With oxygen and going at least twice as fast as Norton and I, they could have got to the top and back to Camp Six if they'd hurried a bit. Many accidents in climbing history have been on the way down. I think it's probable that one of them slipped while the other was not in a position to hold him. I've always thought that the probable place was a snow and ice slope on the way down and that they would have fallen down that terribly precipitous South-East Face.

On his personal equipment for Everest I had a woollen vest, a flannel shirt and three cardigans — not pullovers but cardigans with buttons so that you can take them off easily — and then a short mackintosh coat with buttons up to the top. On my legs I had long woollen underpants and some sort of loose riding breeches. My boots were very light and made in Kendal but big enough to take four pairs of socks. With four pairs of socks, the sweat from your feet settles on the outside pair so that the inner pair stays dry and as long as that stays dry you won't get frostbite. I never got frostbite on Everest or any other mountain on my feet. I'm perfectly satisfied with that as a rational rig-out for climbing. 

On danger I am sure of this: that many adventures like Everest have certain dangers which have to be faced and any adventure is not worth the name unless there is a certain amount of risk attached to it.

 

On Mallory himself One of the disasters of the First World War was the death of so many good people who might have influenced our nation for the better. And I felt that about Mallory — the tragedy of his death on Everest was not just a personal one. He was an idealist who wanted our nation to be a leader in the world: not in the sense of military power or the bossing of other nations but as an example of what civilisation can do for a people to make them happy. He was not exactly communistic but he did believe in an equal chance for everybody as far as it can be given in a well organised society. I should think he would probably have called himself a Fabian type of socialist.

Everest 1924: Irvine standing far left,Mallory next to him.Somerville-Sitting third right.

Chris Brasher : First Published in Mountain Life: Feb/March 1975

Photographs: The Bentley Beetham Collection-Durham University

 

Alex Honnold's 'Alone on the Wall'....Review

'What's Alex Honnold's greatest achievement' asks a CBS reporter of elder statesman John Long. 'His greatest achievement?....staying alive!!!'. Following on from the 2010 documentary, 'Alone on the Wall' which first brought the electric talent of Sacramento rock dude, Alex Honnold to the attention of the wider public, the forthcoming publication in the UK of the eponymously titled book-jointly written by Honnold and respected mountain writer,David Roberts- offers a fascinating and revealing perspective on this climbing phenomenon. Someone who displays paradoxical character traits of warmth, modesty and bonhomie when talking about his achievements, with an almost robotic detachment from natural human fears and emotions when in his natural environment; strung out in extremis on a rock face with nothing but a tenuous smear and a finger lock between himself and the grim reaper.

For mere mortals who climb-never mind the non climbing public- seeing Alex casually making thin, insubstantial bouldering moves a thousand feet above the ground on traditional climbs which 90% of climbers would struggle to lead, never mind solo, is truly mind blowing. Suffice it to say, reading his firsthand accounts of these ascents in Alone on the Wall  just confirms our suspicions that Alex is a rock climbing Terminator! Single mindedly bulldozing his way through apprehension and vacillation and slaying the inner fears and doubts which earth 99.9% of climbers within their technical limits.

Opening with Alex's account of his groundbreaking solo ascent of Moonlight Buttress- the classic route up a sandstone tower in Utah in 2008- the book alternates between Alex's firsthand accounts written in his at times 'Waynes World' lingo to David Robert's sober narrative which puts Alex's achievements into an objective context. As a literary device I think it works well as its always interesting to see how different authors with different voices and from different generations interpret and communicate the same event.

Those climbing anoraks who have followed his meteoric climbing career will be more than familiar with his milestone achievements. Since Moonlight Buttress he has made over 1000 top end solo climbs and undertaken a host of speed record climbs with partners, including an incredible 2 hour 22 minute ascent of El Capitan's Nose. His ascent of El Sendero Luminoso (The Shining Path) in Mexico, a 1700' route rated at 5-12d -or around E6-6c in UK terms-was described at the time as 'the most difficult rope-less climb in history'.The climb which was filmed and shoe horned into a six minute clip by Renan Ozturk, was described by Jeff Jackson editor of Rock and Ice who did the first roped free ascent of the route as... 'In a different Realm entirely-so bad it makes me wonder if Honnold will ever get another visit from Santa.”

The Shining Path Video

Not that Alone on the Wall is entirely rooted in the solar sated world of the West Coast or Nevadan and Mexican deserts. Honnold and Roberts detail expeditions to Alaska, Newfoundland, Patagonia and Chad,and its in Chad where Alex undergoes something of an epiphany. Shocked at the poverty and destitution visited upon the friendly indigenous population, he resolves to use his fame and modest income from climbing to help those in need, both here and back home on the Native American reservations. Borrowing from Schumacher’s idea of Intermediate Technology to help those in the third world, The Honnold Foundation which he establishes,addresses the problems encountered when attempting to provide basic services to remote communities, through the application of renewable technology; small scale wind turbines, solar panels and off grid alternatives to first world utilities which are not an option for most rural communities in the third world.

Complimenting the non climbing narrative is the highly personal account of his off/on relationship with girlfriend Stacey Pearson. The difficulty in maintaining any sort of relationship while living in a van and living the life of a peripatetic dirt bag climber, is painfully laid bare and revealed to be an almost impossible challenge. It’s hard not to feel sympathy for Stacey. Particularly when one considers not just her partner’s travelling lifestyle but the fact that Alex is engaged in a practice from which less than half of this tiny band of top end practitioners survive.

'Names' flow freely throughout the book. Tommy Caldwell, Dean Potter, Conrad Anker and our own Hazel Findlay and James Pearson. All respected and given due credit by the man known to his friends as 'Alex No Big Deal' and who doesn't consider himself a strong climber. It's this shy modesty and his ethical approach to living which aligned to his supernatural ability on rock which makes Alex Honnold such an attractive personality and hero within the climbing community. It's hard to detect an ego or arrogance behind the writing. Both authors relate what are after all, out of this world achievements, in a restrained manner which if anything, underplays the events described.

Overall, revealing, entertaining and inspiring and it’s a doubleplusgood bonus that a chunk of the proceeds of the book will find their way into the excellent Honnold Foundation coffers. Alone on the Wall is out on the 5th November in the UK.

Panmacmillan publisher book link

John Appleby: 2015

                                        Krabometer rating

 

Gary Snyder...The Cold Mountain Poet

Gary Snyder: Photo Arya Degenhardt: Mono Lake Community

Who can leap the world ties/and sit with me amongst the white clouds

Han Shan,a Tang Dynasty poet.

Almost half a century ago, I was walking back to Camp 4 in the Yosemite Valley, accompanied by the legendary US climber, Chuck Pratt, when we met up with another outdoor enthusiast walking in our opposite direction. This stranger, unknown to me, was known to Chuck, and they exchanged greetings, and I was introduced in that off hand way that climbers think of as sufficient, and we went on our way, eager to reach camp and slake our thirst after a day, climbing in the intense heat of August.

Once back in camp, I ventured to ask Chuck who the guy we had met earlier was, ‘Oh he is from California University. Many years ago he worked here in the Park trail-building. So he knows a lot about Yosemite and Its history’. I had only heard that his name was Gary in our introduction, and it was some time later that I realised that this was Snyder, one of the most famous writers in the States, already with a legendary back story, and a mountaineer of some experience beginning with a very youthful initiation into the sport.

I had been introduced to his writings by one of my own mentors also when young, the late Harold Drasdo. Who in one of our discussions bivouacking under Castle Rock in the Lake District, had enthused about an essay he had recently read by Gary Snyder about hitch-hiking. As it was at that date our own mode of transport, this was what had caused him to take up on this work, and he opined that ‘it was the best such piece of writing he had ever read about the activity and he recommended me to read it!’ High praise indeed for Harold had a keen critical eye for such literature.

So from a young age the name Gary Snyder was known to me, and after our chance meeting in Yosemite Valley I have followed his career with more than a little interest, and it is one of the most fascinating life stories that I know of. For he is a poet, essayist, environmentalist, logger, academic, mountaineer, Zen Buddhist, trail builder, fire-lookout and much more.

Gary Snyder, Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg visiting the Lama Govinda, Kausani, India 1962

He was born in the San Francisco area in 1930, but moved as a schoolboy to Oregon at the break-up of his Parents marriage; whence he started with other school friends travelling out into the countryside, and then as a young teenager he started to climb. He joined the Mazamas mountaineering club, based in Portland where he went to school and eventually college and over the next immediate years he ascended many of the major peaks in the Cascade Mountains, Mounts Hood, Baker, Rainier, Shasta, Adams, and St Helens.

Descending off the last as a 15 year old he learnt with some horror of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the time he was 20 years old he was a highly experienced mountaineer, but his ascents were accomplished with a brio where he wished ‘to develop a fresh mountaineering mind-set that was totally opposed to the notion of conquest. I and the circle I climbed with were extremely critical of what we saw as the hostile Jock, occidental mind-set which was to conquer it…… I always thought of mountaineering not as a matter of conquering the mountain, but as a matter of self-knowledge’. He went on to also note ‘that my first interest in writing poetry came from the experience of mountaineering. I couldn’t find any other way to talk about it’. Only someone who has climbed could write a poem like the following;

After scanning its face again and again
I began to scale it, picking my holds
With intense caution. About half-way
To the top, I was suddenly brought to
A dead stop, with arms outspread
Clinging close to the face of the rock
Unable to move hand or foot
Either up or down. My doom
Appeared fixed. I must fall

(An extract from a longer poem, ‘John Muir on Mount Ritter’) 

Snyder studied Literature and Anthropology at College, and became interested in folk lore research, and spent some time at the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Central Oregon. This experience was to be a major influence upon him, drawing on their songs and poems and feelings about nature and mountain scenery. This was also the beginning of an interest in Buddhism, particularly because of its attitudes pro nature, and each winter there was also mountain skiing. He ran around with a group of older ex-ski troopers, who called themselves ‘The Wolken-Schiebers’.

After graduating he obtained a Fellowship at Indiana University to study anthropology, but he left and moved to San Francisco to follow his growing interest in Asian culture, languages and poetry. For this he enrolled at the University of California, specialising in ink and wash painting and Tang dynasty poetry. He continued to climb, and spent time in Yosemite and a whole of a summer working there as a trail-builder. He studied under Hasegawa who introduced him to landscape painting as a meditative practice, and he began work on his most famous poetic work, ‘Mountains and Rivers without End’ which he did not complete for forty years. He also embarked on a translation of the ‘Cold Mountain Poems’, by the legendary 8^th century Chinese recluse, Han Shan, which means simply in translation ‘Cold Mountain’.

These poems from the Tang Dynasty are some of the most famous, and have been translated into many languages. No one knows who really wrote them, but in Japan they have a similar recognition as Shakespeare in the UK. The Tang Dynasty (618-907) was the golden age of Chinese poetry, it is hard hitting authentic verse, and here is Snyder’s translation of poem number eleven (there are hundreds of them in the sequence)

Spring water in the green creek is clear
Moonlight on Cold Mountain is white
Silent knowledge-The spirit is enlightened of itself
Contemplate the void: This world exceeds stillness.

During these early years of the 1950’s San Francisco was a gathering place for poets and a focal point for what became known as ‘The Beat Movement’,which actually had its origins on the East Coast of the USA with William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, but it moved west and ended in California along with it leading proponents. Snyder got to know Kerouac through these associations and persuaded him to become, like himself a ‘fire watcher’ in the Northern Cascades. Kerouac was later to recall of their first meeting that unlike the other urban dwelling so called ‘Beats’ (Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Corso etc), outdoorsman Snyder did not look like a ‘poet’. My memory of him from my own short introduction was of a physically powerful, dark and lithe individual of above medium height, with a wispy beard.  Who could have been a lumberjack, which it transpires he has also been in between courses.

It was in the summer of 1953 that Snyder and Kerouac worked as fire Lookouts, and this is now the subject of a coffee table book of photographs and text by John Suiter, ‘Poets on the Peaks’ published in 2002. Snyder’s Lookout was on Sourdough Mountain, and Kerouac’s Desolation. One feels reading about this now that the latter took some persuading to take this on, but was converted to the idea by Snyder’s mantra, that ‘the twin of the active life is the contemplative one’ and as a fire lookout for six weeks one has many hours in which to undertake this! As Snyder wrote as he left his peak…..

I the poet Gary Snyder
Stayed six weeks in fifty-three
On this ridge and on this rock
And saw what every Lookout sees
Saw these mountains shift about
And end up on the ocean floor
Saw the wind and waters break
The branched deer, the eagle eye
And when pray tell, shall the Lookouts die.
 

Amazingly now Snyder’s activities as a poet interested in Chinese studies, and working as a lookout in the summer months, brought him to the attention of the infamous senator Joe McCarthy, head of The House, un-American activities committee. And he was blackballed for not being patriotic enough to work any longer for the US government as a Lookout. At least he was in good company over this for many of the most outstanding artists and writers of that era suffered a similar fate, everyone from the playwright Arthur Miller to Charlie Chaplin.

Snyder made poetry out of such viciousness.

I never was so broke and down                                                              
Got fired that day by the USA
(The district ranger up at Packwood
Thought the wobblies had been dead for forty years
But the FBI smelled treason-my red beard

The experience however working as a lookout led Kerouac to write one of his most famous ‘Beat’ novels, ‘The Dharma Bums’. In this, three friends head off into the High Sierra Mountains in search of Dharma or Truth and to experience the Zen way of life. The climb therein described up the Matterhorn Peak is one of the most memorable in American literature, and Snyder is the inspiration for the novels main character, the mountain climbing, haiku writing Japhy Ryder. The novel closes with a vision of the aforementioned Han Shan at Snyder’s suggestion, and the work is dedicated to this fabled Tang dynasty poet.

Snyder and Ginsberg

The literary fame of the Beat poets was launched in October 1955 at a reading in the 6 Gallery in San Francisco, and whilst it is Ginsberg’s long poem ‘Howl’ that is best remembered, Snyder’s follow on contribution ‘The Berry Feast’ has also stood the test of time. Most of the Beats were enamored of Eastern religion and psychedelia  (way ahead of groups like The Beatles and other popular artists of the ‘sixties) and for Snyder it was Zen Buddhism that was to be his spiritual muse. Zen is a fusion of Mahayana Buddhism and Taoism. This latter a purely Chinese construct as is Zen which is known in China as Chan. Bidding goodbye to the Beat poets, he took off in 1956 for Japan, where he enrolled at a monastery in Kyoto to study Zen, but also to continue his writing and translating poetry. His 1957 collection of poems ‘The Back Country’ also includes translations by him of the now famous Japanese poet Kenji (1896-1933). He stayed in Japan until 1964, and then returned home to the USA as a crew member on an oil freighter.

Once back in the USA he started work on building his own house in the northern Sierra Mountains, found occasional employment as a logger, but never stopped writing and lobbying for wilderness preservation. Over the next decades he became acknowledged as America’s primary poet-celebrant of the wilderness, a nature poet in the tradition of Thoreau and Emerson. He mused himself on his own work: How Poetry Comes To Me

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my camp fire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light.

From the late sixties onwards Snyder’s poetry and essays have never ceased to flow, in 1969 ‘Riprap* and the Cold Mountain Poems’, in 1975 he won a Pulitzer Prize for his ‘Turtle Island’ collection. (Turtle Island is an old/new name for the USA).And over the ensuing years there have been over 20 volumes of poetry or essays published by him. Some like ‘Turtle Island’ have been reprinted many times. Others of his works, like ‘Danger on Peaks’(2004) might be readily identified with by climbers, including as it does poems of Snyder’s own first ascent of Mount St Helens. He finally published his great work in 1996, ‘Mountains and Rivers without End’ after 40 years of labour on its contents, winning the Bollingen poetry prize for his efforts. If he lived in the UK he would now be seen as a National treasure, loaded as he is with awards including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Bess Hoskin prize, the Levinson prize for poetry and so much more, including a major award in Japan for a collection of Haiku (2004).

His essays are equally notable, especially ‘The Practice of the Wild’ (1990), a series of ten essays which are now identified as a central work, on the interaction of nature and culture, calling amongst its pages for an ecological consciousness. He has been described as the poet laureate of deep ecology.

His latest book of poems ‘The present moment’ was published in 2015, and for many years he was a Professor at the University of California. At which he is now an Emeritus Professor. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1987, and the impressive fact of all this recognition is that he is still highly regarded by his fellow poets and the critics. There has even been a biographical film made about him, ‘A Zen Life’ by D.T. Suzuki. Not a bad outcome for someone who originally only started writing to express his feelings about his mountaineering experiences, so maybe we can claim him as one of our own?

Gary Snyder and Friends
 

A short finishing poem perhaps sums up best how he feels about the wilderness experience:

For All.

‘Ah to be alive
On a mid-September morn
Fording a stream
Barefoot, pants rolled up
Holding boots, pack on
Sunshine, ice in the shallows
Northern Rockies.’

Dennis Gray:2015

    

*Riprap…. A cobble of stone laid on steep slick rock to make a trail for horses in the mountains.